passages - Pro Helvetia · This issue of Passages is dedicated to the felicity provided by art. It was conceived in tandem with the Forum Kultur und Ökonomie ... plankton, an important

passages

Epiphany in a Petri Dish: Artists-in-Labs p.6 The Walls Have Tongues: Swiss Sound Art in San Francisco p.36

Inspiring Rome: Turning Time into Art p.38

Art Will Make You Happy!

THE CULTURAL MAGAZINE OF PRO HELVETIA, NO. 53, IssUE 2/2010

P18456_Passagen_E_S01-09.indd 1 02.08.10 08:49

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3 EDITORIAL The Sources of Happiness Janine Messerli

4 PRO HELVETIA NEWSFLASH Intelligent games / Contemporary Swiss music / Parisian dreamscapes / Friendly rematch

6 REPORTAGE Epiphany in a Petri Dish Brigitte Ulmer (text) Caroline Minjolle (photos)

36 LOCAL TIME San Francisco: Sound

Surroundings Peter Kraut

Rome: Rambles through the Eternal City

Kordula Doerfler

39 PARTNER PROFILE The Loterie Romande:

A Mainspring of Creativity Ariane Gigon

40 IMPRESSUM PASSAGES ONLINE NEXT ISSUE

41 VIEWPOINT Of Bards and Bandwagons Guy Krneta

42 GALLERY A Showcase for Artists “Global Garden” by Tom Tirabosco

Swiss artist Olaf Breuning advises us to Make Art and Be Happy! The 13 photographs and sculptures shown in this issue provide instructions.

12 The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number

Pius Knüsel

14 Art’s Impossible Jouissance Peter Schneider

16 Sewers or the Sublime? Gerhard Schulze

24 In the Thrall of Writing Michel Layaz

26 On the Purpose of Art, or, Why We Need a New Discussion of Values

Eleonora Belfiore

32 Timing and Happiness Philip Ursprung

10 – 35 Dossier: ART WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY!

Olaf BreuningBorn in Schaffhausen in 1970, Olaf Breuning now lives in New York. After training as a photographer and studies at the Zurich University of the Arts he went on to mount numerous solo exhibitions, among other places at Metro Pictures in New York (2009), Zurich’s migros museum (2007), IMA in Brisbane (2006) and Chisenhale of London (2005), and to participate in group shows at Les Abattoirs Museum in Toulouse (2010) and St. Gallen’s Kunstmuseum (2010).Asked about happiness and his work, he notes: “I don’t know if art makes me happy. All I know is I would be unhappy without it.”www.olafbreuning.com

Cover:“The Band”, 2007 (detail)Photo by Olaf Breuning

CONTENTs


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“Every man is the architect of his own fortune,” as a venerable maxim would have it. Convinced of their unalienable right to “the pursuit of hap-piness”, America’s forefathers enshrined the now-famous formula in their Declaration of Independence; the Japanese have even included its coun-terpart in their constitution. Others see happiness as a fleeting phenom-enon: difficult to grasp, let alone to build, it is a capricious guest and comes and goes as it pleases.

This issue of Passages is dedicated to the felicity provided by art. It was conceived in tandem with the Forum Kultur und Ökonomie (Culture and Economy Forum), a regular conference on issues of art and the mar-ket, which met this spring under the heading Kunst macht glücklich! (“Art Will Make You Happy!”). Writer Michel Layaz describes the elation he experiences as he practises his craft (without denying the concomitant travails), while Peter Schneider, a psychoanalyst, takes a Socratic ap-proach to determining what art and happiness are, and how the one might cause the other. In the social arena, a veritable panoply of effects are at-tributed to art: art is said to educate us, to beautify our lives and to make us think, claims that add support to the argument for state subsidies. In the United Kingdom, notes Eleonora Belfiore, a professor of cultural pol-icy, the campaign for arts subsidies has increasingly positioned itself clos-er to social and economic agendas, with an eye to gaining a slice of their grander budgets. Champions of the art world in Switzerland argue in like fashion, claiming that culture fosters integration and enhances cohesion within a given society; that it helps to drive economic development; and that it affords “unique selling propositions” to the sites of its production.

In his “address to the taxpayer”, sociologist of culture Gerhard Schulze notes that the social benefits of art and culture are less patent than those of, say, a sewage system, and identifies the immediate cause of art-induced joy in our encounter with a work of art. The ensuing moment of self-transcendence, Schulze maintains, is what we call happiness.

For those who like their pleasure mano a mano, we recommend “Make Art and Be Happy” (p. 18) by Olaf Breuning, whose hieratic wit makes his visual art just right for this issue. Because after all, smile and the world smiles with you!

Janine MesserliManaging Editor, Passages

EdITORIAL

The Sources of Happiness


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On 11 and 12 September 2010 con-temporary Swiss music – whether or-chestral or solo, improvised or installed, show tune or folk – will pull out all the stops at the Tonkünstlerfest / Fête des Musiciens. This year, the festival cele-brates a premiere: for the first time in its 110-year history, the contemporary musicians’ mega-event will be part of the programme at the renowned Lu-cerne Festival, which has made the Swiss music scene a centrepiece of this year’s edition. As a gift to its hosts, the musicians’ festival will present a full 24 premieres on the second weekend in September. Alongside established com-posers such as Dieter Ammann, this year’s composer-in-residence, audiences will get the chance to meet a new gener-ation of practitioners. For the occasion, Pro Helvetia has commissioned works by Ammann and five other young composers: Cécile Marti, Xavier Dayer, Stefan Wirth, Nadir Vassena and Michael Wertmüller. For more infor-mation: www.tonkuenstlerfest.ch and www.lucernefestival.ch

Contemporary Swiss music

Intelligent games

Computer games are among the most popular forms of entertainment today. They have become an integral part of everyday culture for many sec-tors of the population, not only the young. An ongoing public debate focus-es on “killer games” and the risk of ad-diction associated with excessive gam-ing. Attracting less attention, however, is the emergence of Swiss game design-ers within the university scene who are developing innovative and intelligent forms of the new medium. This trend has been confirmed by a survey com-missioned by Pro Helvetia and conduct-ed by Dr. Beat Suter from Zurich Univer-sity of the Arts.

This is where Pro Helvetia and its new programme “GameCulture” come in: over the next two years Pro Helvetia will provide targeted support for superi-

or computer games. GameCulture gets underway on 9 September with a call for projects issued jointly by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture and the SUISA Foundation for Music at Fantoche, the International Animation Film Festi-val in Baden. Ultimately, the point is that computer games can unleash the creative potential of artists of various disciplines, from scriptwriters to design-ers to composers.

The two-year programme, which has a budget of 1.5 million francs, will include a variety of exhibitions and discussion forums. These activities are aimed at providing information, and highlighting not only the aesthetic and social aspects of computer games, but also the commercial considerations. Also collaborating in this venture are, among others, Zurich University of the Arts, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival.

www.prohelvetia.ch

“Colorbind”, a computer game by Nonverbal

PRO HELVETIA NEwsFLAsH

Anna Spina, Tonkünstlerfest


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What do Swiss people mean when they talk about illness or recovery? What is the counterpart among Chinese? In Treatment/Heiler werden (Becoming A Healer), one of 60 projects comprised by Pro Helvetia’s Swiss Chinese Cultural Explorations exchange programme, the Basel-based theatre ensemble Capri-Connection and Beijing’s Living Dance Studio explore these and other issues with material from such far-flung cor-ners of the earth as the Emmental re-gion of Switzerland and China’s Qingdao. Further Sino-Helvetian collaborative ef-forts will be on view from 16 September to 7 December 2010 at the Culturescapes Festival, to be held in various Swiss cit-ies. The Festival, which this year features China as guest country and a host of art

Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger love playfulness. They cover walls with psychedelic patterns reminiscent of the 1960s and use industrially produced urea to cultivate artificial plants and crystal-line stalactite-like forms. The interna-tionally renowned artist couple develop these growing yet transient dreamscapes on site, thereby incorporating local con-ditions into their interventions. They have previously exhibited in spaces as di-verse as the Abbey Library of St. Gallen and the Swiss Cultural Centre in Paris.

In summer a veritable hotchpotch of stuffed animals and other materials was loaded onto a lorry in Uster, the small town near Zurich where Steiner and Len-zlinger have their studio, and transported to Paris. Jean-Paul Felley and Olivier Kae-ser, the Swiss Cultural Centre’s curators,

had invited the artist duo to Paris on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the cultural centre, Pro Helvetia’s first office abroad. The artists then spent several

Friendly rematch

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n Treatment / Heiler werden – a Swiss-Chinese theatrical production

weeks devising their exhibition, tailoring it to the parameters of the centre, which is situated in the middle of the pedestrian zone of the Marais quarter. Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger have been working together since 1997, and have been famil-iar figures on the Paris art scene for some time already. They have already had three exhibitions in the French capital.

www.ccsparis.com

Parisian dreamscapes

Work by Steiner&Lenzlinger, 2009

projects from all genres, is the ideal venue for the presentation of the fruits of cultural exchange, as the exhibition in Switzerland will have just come from its stint in the Middle Kingdom. Swiss-Chinese collaboration calls for considerable translation work – not only linguistic, however, but cultural as well, as addressed in the Translating Cultures series at Culturescapes. On 30 October, within the context of a symposium in Bern, Pro Helvetia invites artists from both countries to talk publicly about their experience. For information and the complete programme see www.culturescapes.ch


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Microorganisms from the Chriesbach creek in Dübendorf play a starring role in the latest videos by Chinese visual artist Aniu, who spent five months working at EAWAG, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. With the help of scientific instru-ments and processes, he created powerful poetic images – and gave the scientists new perspec-tives on familiar material.

By Brigitte Ulmer (text) and Caroline Minjolle (photos)

QingJun Chen, who goes by the artist’s name Aniu, is standing in the Chriesbach creek bed, not far from the Überlandstrasse thoroughfare in Düben-dorf, wearing green fisherman’s pants. Dis-appointed, he calls out: “This time no ani-mals!” Here, in the no-man’s-land of the Zurich suburbs, where leftover nature bor-ders unromantically on civilization, are the headquarters of EAWAG, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s aquatic research centre. Aniu, who is here on an artist-in-residence programme, is doing field work – as his outfit and fishing net testify. The net is full of mud and dirt, but there’s noth-ing crawling around in it, at least nothing visible to the naked eye. The 41-year-old artist from Shenzhen knows better, of course: plankton, an important component of the aquatic ecosystem, contains millions of microorganisms, two million of which would fit into a teaspoon. But he’s right, too: this time there is nothing crawling around in the brown sludge.

Over the past five months Aniu has made thirty trips into the water for his art project; up until now he has always found

Epiphany in a Petri Dish

A new take on life under water: Chinese artist Aniu and some of his work


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something. He collected water samples in a plastic bucket, took them to one of EAWAG’s sterile laboratories, put them un-der the microscope, and concentrated on observing the aquatic life forms in the petri dish. As if he were imitating the scientists’ methods, he used their equipment and performed the same gestures. In his case, however, the result was not a set of empir-ical data that could be used to verify theo-ries about the aquatic ecosystem and its biodiversity, but powerful poetic photos and videos reminiscent of alchemy.

Creative exchange between art and science

As a participant in the Zurich Uni-versity of the Arts’ programme Artists-in-Labs, which Aniu was able to join thanks to support from Pro Helvetia, the artist developed and carried out several projects designed to reflect scientific research in emotional ways. Last year, both he and fellow Chinese artist Liao Wenfeng were chosen by an independent jury to create a project for Artists-in-Labs. Wenfeng was invited to the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) in Birmensdorf to delve into the world of dendrochronology, the study of tree-ring growths. At the same time, two Swiss artists went on residencies in Chi-nese laboratories: the Genevan Alexandre Joly at the Chengdu Institute of Biology, and Aline Veillat, from Basel, at the Insti-tute of Mountain Hazards and Environ-

ment, both renowned research institutes in Chengdu, in western China.

This cultural exchange project is part of Pro Helvetia’s international strategy. Since 2004 the Arts Council has been stepping up its activities in Asia. The pro-gramme Swiss Chinese Cultural Explora-tions (2008–2010) and a new liaison office opening in Shanghai in the fall of 2010 will further strengthen cultural cooperation with China. Through Pro Helvetia’s China/Swiss Residency Exchange Programme, the Zurich University of the Arts has for the first time been able to expand its exist-ing Artists-in-Labs exchange to include foreign artists. The aim of Artists-in-Labs is to offer artists new creative options, to make scientific research more accessible to the general public, and to broaden sci-ence’s potential for innovation through artistic creativity.

For the Swiss-Chinese exchange, lab-oratories from the ecological sector were chosen. Since the rapid growth of industry in China has caused considerable environ-mental problems, it was deemed of partic-ular interest to give Chinese artists the op-portunity to reflect on ecological issues in their work, and thus encourage awareness of environmental challenges both at home and abroad.

Pollution as an artistic subject Aniu’s interest in ecology is rooted

in his own biography. In his home town of Shenzhen, in the Pearl River Delta in southern Guangdong province, he wit-nessed the lightning pace of development that turned the fishing village into a boom town, with the ensuing consequences for the environment. Shenzhen is one of the fastest growing cities in the world. In 1979

REPORTAGE

Aniu submerges scientists’ intimate communications in water samples drawn from Chriesbach creek and photo-graphs them as they dissolve.


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the population was 30,000; today it is 12 million. In his photography projects, Aniu portrayed the growing tangle of freeways, and the mounting pressure and stress ex-perienced by the inhabitants. The image of the river polluted by industrial chemicals made a deep impression on him. “I remem-ber when the water was crystal clear. Today it is black,” he says. In his view, the “collat-

eral damage” of pollution caused by un-checked economic growth is one of the big-gest problems China faces today. Although the government is making an effort to improve the situation, and investing a lot of money, the measures taken thus far have not brought the hoped-for results. “The people should learn to respect nature more,” says Aniu.

His residence period in Switzerland was not easy at the start. For one thing, it was difficult to switch from working in the streets, as he does for the French photo agency VU’, to working in a scientific labo-ratory. In addition, the move from a pul-sating city of 12 million to the sleepy Swiss village of Dübendorf was a problem at first. “For the first few weeks, I had no idea what went on in this building,” he remi-nisces. “It was winter, the weather was grey, my mood was frozen.” He smiles to himself and talks about his mentor Chris, thanks to whom he found his way into the world of aquatic research, and science in general. Christopher Robinson, a 50-year-old aquatic ecologist, is an American with laughing eyes and a friendly face, and a specialist in the effects of environmental change on stream ecosystems. For five months, Aniu shared an office with Chris,

and slowly discovered the mysterious uni-verse of the aquatic scientists and their main elements: water, microbes, theories, and lots of numerical data.

The human being behind the scientistFour hundred people from twenty-six

countries work at EAWAG; the cafeteria is a jumble of languages, as one can imag-ine. Through lunchtime talks with young scientists, and with Chris Robinson’s sup-port, Aniu’s artistic projects began to take on form. His key idea was to examine the relationship between the scientists and the object of their research. “Scientists make great contributions to our planet that sometimes have a tragic effect on human beings,” Aniu observes, and refers to the controversial Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangtze River in China. The giant hy-droelectric dam displaced over a million people from their homes and flooded important archaeological sites. It is also causing tremendous damage to the envi-ronment: polluting the river, wiping out animal species, and increasing the risk of floods and landslides.

“If I am treating the question of re-search, the first thing I have to do is to find the human being behind the scientist, and look at the relationship that person has to the environment,” Aniu explains. He sent out over one hundred e-mail question-naires in order to investigate the EAWAG scientists’ relationship to water. A sample of the questions: What does water mean to you? What are your first memories of wa-ter? What do you see as the role of science in society, and what motivates you? In re-turn, Aniu received some pointed replies, as well as some surprising, often highly personal responses, such as this one, from Office BU-R07: “Water means mystery to me.” Aniu selected the most intriguing an-swers, visited the scientists in their offices, and had them write out a chosen phrase in ink on a slip of paper. He then took the pieces of paper back to his own laboratory, placed them in petri dishes full of his mi-croorganism water samples, and filmed the results with a video camera. The resulting videos are between 30 seconds and 30 min-utes long, and show insects such as flies, water spiders and dragonflies creeping over the slips of paper and ultimately devouring the words. The spectacle greatly amuses Chris Robinson. “The videos are very plas-

tic representations of the essence of micro-organisms, ” he says. “They open our eyes to fundamental processes and interactions between microorganisms within aquatic ecosystems.” The artist’s subjective per-spective helps communicate scientific no-tions to non-scientists. Robinson can im-agine showing these videos to students in an introductory course in aquatic ecology. Whether these artworks can also aid sci-entists in increasing the innovative poten-tial of their work – as the exchange pro-gramme’s initiators hope – remains an open question.

After five months, Aniu has become part of the EAWAG team. Walking down the hall, he greets research colleagues from Israel and India. In the foyer, a small exhibition of Aniu’s work is a topic of con-versation among the scientists. There are feverish videos showing streams of ink dissolving into the water, reminiscent of Chinese Shan Shui paintings. The watery micro-universe, depicted in close-up by the artist, can captivate even specialized aquatic scientists who deal with similar materials every day.

Exhibitions showing works from the Artists-in-Labs programme will take place this fall in two Swiss locations: both ways, at the Art Forum in Vevey, 7–17 October 2010, and at PROGR Zentrum für Kulturproduktion in Bern, 20 November to 3 December 2010. www.artistsinlabs.ch Brigitte Ulmer is a historian and an art journalist. She writes for the monthly magazine Du and the NZZ newspaper, contributes to catalogues, and co-curated the 2008 exhibition Manon – A Person. Caroline Minjolle is a freelance photograph in Zurich and a member of the kontrast collective (www.kontrast.ch) and the Pixsil photo agency. Translated from the German by Marcy Goldberg

“For the first few weeks, I had no idea what went on in this building,” says Aniu. “It was winter, the weather was grey, my mood was frozen.”


Art Will mAke you HAppy!

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A rt makes life more beautiful. It educates. It calls to arms. It’s a licence to print money, and

it’s good for your public image. With so many claims making the rounds, it might be a good idea to have a closer look at art’s capacity to induce euphoria. Conceived in tandem with the Culture and Economy Forum, this issue of Passages assembles a range of responses to the proposition that “Art Will Make You Happy!” A writer, a cultural studies expert and a psychoanalyst (among others) try their hand at identifying the effects of art, visually heckled all the while by Swiss artist Olaf Breuning.

Art Will Make You Happy!



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“Easter Bunnies”, 2004



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ulture for all!” Ever since Hilmar Hoffmann, at the time Frankfurt’s city councillor in charge of cultural affairs, launched this slogan in 1979, art has been

touted as a magic formula capable of curing all of society’s ills – furthering civilization, lessening racism, preventing the rise of dangerous parallel societies, spreading democracy and education, aiding integration, solving local problems, boosting economic innovation, creating meaning and generally combating human frailty. “Culture for all” has been the driving force behind cultural policy in recent times, paving the way for the tremendous expansion of both the concept of culture and the range of cultural activities that has characterized postmodernism.

As Max Fuchs, head of the German Cultural Council, noted in a 2008 address to the Culture and Economy Forum in Bern (“Cultural Policy as Control Policy”), the sheer number of expectations associated with culture is reflected in the difficulty of demonstrating its actual effects. As a result, cultural policy has sought funding by positioning itself increasingly closely to social and economic agendas, thus manoeuvering itself into a tight spot from which it is now having trouble getting out (as Eleonora Belfiore argues on p. 26). If a given policy area loses significance, budgets are cut accordingly. And so the fundamental question remains: how can cultural policy define itself as an ongoing task for the state?

Every era and nation must find its own response to this question. Why does our country need an institution like Pro Helvetia – and each canton and municipality its own funding structures as well? As a nation, Switzerland emphasizes federalist diversity, regionalism and the individual citizen. The Swiss Federal Constitution of 1848 contains provisions designed to prevent the development of a national artistic and cultural canon: the constitution puts culture under cantonal jurisdiction. Switzerland abhors uniformity.

Under these circumstances, cultural funding acquires a very particular significance: as a system for sharing the wealth. Society provides the means, which are then redistributed to specific groups, in our case artists and artistic venues. Sharing in collective financial resources is what creates cohesion, because participation promotes commitment, forges bonds and creates standards of communication accepted by all, even those who come out emptyhanded. Among the 1500 art pro

jects supported each year by Pro Helvetia, there is no unifying Swiss trait to be found. Ben Vautier put it clearly enough in his slogan for the Swiss pavilion at the 1992 World’s Fair in Seville: “La Suisse n’existe pas” – there is no such thing as Switzerland. What all projects supported by Pro

Helvetia have in common is – precisely that: they are Swiss art works because they were funded by Switzerland. This is what strengthens communal cohesion: that an artist who may appeal to only a tiny fraction of the population (or to a large segment!) has access to collective resources, that each artistic contribution becomes part of our collective cultural inventory and lends it additional colour. Therein lies the need for an institution like Pro Helvetia. Because by enabling artistic participation,

which results in creative contributions to our shared cultural capital, Pro Helvetia makes possible a myriad of small moments of happiness. Among them we find yodelling and computer music, paper cutouts and experimental videos, amateur theatre and world literature. The point is not how much one likes any or all of these individual works. The more contradictory and diverse they are, the better they can contribute to the fermentation process of our society, whether as catalysts or preser vatives.

What is true for Pro Helvetia also applies to regional and municipal funding bodies. On every level we find the same principle in action: subsidized artists (and the people they represent) all have a share in collective resources, thus strengthening cohesion through public subsidies. Private sponsors, as crucial as they are, cannot produce this same effect because their funds do not stem from the collective.

This is why any country that values its intellectual life cannot afford to dispense with public funding of the arts: because public funding embodies the recognition that people who use their imagination as raw material are indispensable for the production of collective happiness.

Pius Knüsel is the director of Pro Helvetia Translated from the German by Marcy Goldberg

The Greatest Good for

the Greatest Number

Art’s effects are evidently legion, its uses to human society a myriad and the reasons

for its promotion like grains of sand on the beach. But does art in fact make the

world more just, and people more intelli-gent? Does it make us happy? The answer is

simple: happiness is sharing.

By Pius Knüsel

C

Therein lies the need for an institution like Pro

Helvetia: by enabling artistic participation, it makes

possible a myriad of small moments of happiness…



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“Clouds”, 2008



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he easiest response to the question whether art makes us happy would of course be to dismiss it as stupid because it is inadequate. But we could not

do that with a clear conscience, because the saying goes that there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. I tend towards a third approach: there are such things as stupid questions, but their very stupidity gives us food for thought, because they subvert the categories that we take for granted when giving our answer. So: does art make us happy?

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“Enjoy Kirchner’s ‘Alpleben’ without having to think about performance curves.” Or: “Enjoy Hopper’s ‘ Gas’ without having to think about your energy stocks.” These two statements backed by celebrated works of art come from a campaign run by Zurich’s cantonal bank to advertise its private banking services. If they are to be believed, the answer to our question must be yes, art makes us happy, but only under certain conditions: if you can afford to hang it on your wall at home, and if you can reliably entrust the preservation and growth of your assets to your bank, leaving you free to enjoy your art in full without troubling thoughts to distract you. And quite possibly this is not even the stupidest answer you could give to the question whether art makes us happy.

The wholly indiscreet charm of this advertising campaign consists in the fact that it expresses the implications of conflating art and happiness or art and pleasure (a common tendency but one that is highly questionable from an aesthetic point of view) in a way that is unashamedly affirmative. And at the same time blithely circumvents all discussion of what art and happiness actually mean, and how we can conceive of the one being “made” by the other. What is art supposed to be good for except for us to enjoy it and derive from it a pleasure that we cannot obtain anywhere else?

By contrast, Adorno’s assertion that the very concept of “enjoying art” exposes one as a philistine seeking to reverse the irrevocable “emancipation of the arts from the products of the kitchen” is well meant. But ultimately it is merely a helpless argument from authority that offers scant opposition to the slogan “happiness through art”. And when Adorno decrees that “in fact, one enjoys works of art less the more one understands them,” his statement even coincides to some extent with what the advertisers are insinuating. Except

that in the private banking advertisements this absence of understanding or knowledge is endowed with a positive connotation: one is happy if one can afford to forget.

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But forget what? Could one create a slogan such as “Enjoy Ai Weiwei’s ‘Template’ without having to think about the destruction of centuriesold monuments of Chinese culture”? Hardly, because we can scarcely view this monumental sculpture, created by Ai Weiwei from the wooden doors and windows of demolished houses from the Ming and Qing dynasties, without being reminded of their destruction. So how about “Enjoy Ai Weiwei’s ‘ Template’ without having to think about the performance of your Chi

nese real estate fund”? That would be more acceptable, albeit extremely cynical, because it suppresses the very link between booming construction and cultural destruction that constitutes the critical content of Ai Weiwei’s sculpture. So is there (harmless) art that (in certain circumstances) can make us happy, and art whose very essence lies in the fact that it makes us unhappy? The obvious answer is yes. Yet precisely because of that art (such as Ai Weiwei’s) which, it is claimed, necessarily makes us unhappy, this an

swer has some unpleasant implications: does it not reduce the work of art to a statement that, although laboriously constructed, could just as easily be formulated in a brief political protest note? And does this not reduce the impact of a work of art to the facile and naively therapeutic formula of reminding us of what we have suppressed?

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Certainly, art does not make us happy in the way that, say, Valium makes us sleepy or Ritalin makes us more alert. Sarah Kofman speaks of the “melancholy of art” that arises from the fact that works of art always remain alien to us in a way that constitutes their very nature, because what they present to us is always more than the mere representation of some

thing else. Yet it is in this very “melancholy” that we find the impetus for happiness in works of art: that they say more to us than we can say to them.

Peter Schneider is a psychoanalyst and journalist living and working in Zurich. He also lectures in psychoanalysis at the University of Bremen. He has published numerous books, most recently Das Gehirn und seine Psyche. www.peterschneider.info Translated from the German by Geoffrey Spearing

Art’s Impossible Jouissance

Art certainly does not induce euphoria the way Valium does tranquility

or Ritalin attentiveness, notes psycho-analyst Peter Schneider. The enjoyment

of art is far more complex.

By Peter Schneider

T



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“Small Brain Big Stomach”, 2009



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here is a desperate need to explain the use of art, yet anyone who asks what it is immediately risks being dismissed as a philistine. More often than not, the

response is silence and a resigned smile. The subtext is that anyone who asks the question must be too dumb to deserve an answer. Nowadays, this still widespread attitude of airy dismissal has been joined by an allencompassing semantic suggestion. From Finland to Gibraltar, a cultural policy consensus lies over Europe like an immovable high pressure area: an unshakeable conviction that art and culture are important. Cultural policy associations are ubiquitous, as are chairs of culture management, heads of culture departments, culture promotion institutions, congresses and doctoral theses. All exist in a climate of comprehensive agreement. Perhaps that is justified. But when, for instance, I leaf through a yearbook of the German Cultural Policy Society, I am struck by the way that after a few pages, the words “art” and “culture” begin to sound like what ornithologists refer to as “contact calls.” Taken together with the other words that invariably accompany this discourse – participation, education, creativity, equality of opportunity, democratization, and so on – they produce a noise like a harmonica connected to a hair drier: an uninterrupted C major, a surfeit of harmony without semitones to break the monotony.

The grumbling taxpayer as judgeIn my quest for a modicum of dialec

tics, I now invite the disgruntled taxpayer – who has little time for art and culture – to act as judge. I want to establish what cultural policy has to say to such people. I assume a relationship of mutual, prejudging mistrust between the state and the citizen: the state views taxpayers as subjects compelled to pay their dues and uniformly suspected of an inclination to fiddle their taxes, to a degree that is already factored into the tax rates. Taxpayers, for their part, see themselves as the perpetually short

changed objects of a tax policy Tyranno-saurus rex, with the stomach of a Moloch and the brains of a sparrow; whatever the Moloch is able to digest in the form of tax revenues, it transforms into a metabolite not entirely suited to civilized surroundings.

This equilibrium of scepticism would bring the apparatus of state grinding to a halt were it not for the fact that both sides are more afraid of the collapse of the polity than they are of being taken for a ride. The relationship between state and taxpayer, then, is a reciprocal one circumscribed by a discontented and grumbling pragma

tism. I concede that this is only one aspect of the multilayered symbiosis of citizen and state, but many have heard the empty phrases of politicians too often to see in them anything other than placatory formulae whose effect on their target audience is less to convince them than to wear them out.

Let us therefore for a moment consider things pessimistically, casting doubt upon the unimpeachability of the art world, and thus summon up fresh curiosity to ask what the point of it all really is.

Is football necessary?It is only when we step back that we

notice the public routine of excusemaking

and shouldershrugging; one in which the suggestion that you cannot go wrong spending money on art appears particularly schematic. Why is this exactly? From a discourse sociology perspective, what is the difference between funding art on the one hand, and spending money to build a motorway bridge on the other? Policy areas such as road building have one advantage over art: their success can be measured. The results are there for all to see, the benefit and waste can be quantified. Anyone can appreciate the usefulness of a motorway bridge. The use of a woollen thread suspended across a room in the Pinako

thek der Moderne in Munich and described in the catalogue as an “Installation,” by contrast, is something not everyone can understand, as the baffled expressions of visitors reveal all too clearly. So let us now, for the purposes of experiment, imagine a football fan who is interested in nothing but the beautiful game. At first glance, he seems to have little in common with the art lover. He understands that we need railway stations, refuse disposal, schools and prisons. But opera, museums, orchestras and the woollen thread – do we really need all that? We would have to answer no. But we could also ask him a counterquestion: what about football? Is football really necessary? There is a lack of obvious point here that places football

fans and art lovers on an equal footing. Art and football both have their passionate adherents. The issue of justification, then, is by no means restricted to art. How can we justify the use of taxpayers’ money to fund things that are ultimately defined only in the emotional life of everchanging sections of society?

From use to happinessWe may get a little closer to answering

this question if we seek out the middle ground between the barren concept of utility derived from economics and the myriad manifestations of individual desire. Let us now try using the concept of “happiness.” Perhaps this will enable a minimum of mu

Sewers or the Sublime?

No taxpayer would question the usefulness of refuse collection, road building and

sewage systems. But what exactly is the use of art? In an address to the taxpayer,

the celebrated sociologist Gerhard Schulze subjects art to a critical tax assessment.

Encounters with art are a means to self-tran-scendence, which makes us happy.

Just one reason why it’s worth paying for.

By Gerhard Schulze

T



17

tual understanding between the public authorities and the taxpayer, and between the football fan and the exhibition visitor.

Never before have so many been so intensely concerned with the topic of happiness as they are today. Some see this as a comprehensive victory for hedonism, as if everyone were concerned purely with partying until they drop. Yet to really do justice to the modernday discourse on happiness, we need to deduce the spirit of the age from something more than TV commercials and lifestyle magazines. The person in the street – the taxpayer – is now thinking about serious topics that in the past were the exclusive province of the philosophers. Who am I? What do I want? How can I give meaning to my life? What do I need? Questions such as these have become increasingly popular in recent years. They will not disappear; they are more than simply a fashion. They are people’s response to the potential for selfdetermined action in the advanced modern age. The choices available to them have expanded exponentially. Now noone tells them what they should do – they have to find the answers for themselves: in the supermarket, in the Internet, when selecting a partner, on holiday, choosing education, watching TV, or during the period of her life in which a woman can still have children. People read and talk about happiness, meaning, values, good living or whatever they like to call it, because they want to find out how they should lead their lives. These are the central questions that are asked today when tax revenues are being spent. Despotic, religious, nationalistic, racist or collectivist rationales have been replaced by the happiness of the many. The only question is how this motive can express itself politically.

The sausage factory and the problem of making both ends “meat”

At this point, we need to make a fundamental distinction between two dimensions of happiness. I would like to begin by illustrating them using a few examples. In the years of austerity following the Second World War, Germans took a wellknown popular song and changed the words. They sang: “Whom God wishes to favour he sends to the sausage factory.” This period also saw the emergence of what they called the “Schiebewurst,” literally the sliding

sausage. It was not a variety of sausage in its own right, but rather a way of eating it – a cultural technique that has long since been forgotten. Having obtained a meagre

slice of sausage wherever one could, one would place it on a slice of bread and gradually push it forward with one’s teeth as one ate, leaving the last mouthful to be savoured with the eyes closed. The bread represented survival, while the sausage stood for the finer things in life. In terms of the marginal value theorem, human beings benefit substantially less from the sausage now than they did back then – not despite having more of it, but rather be-cause they do.

The image of the sausage factory as a kind of paradise, and the “Schiebewurst” strategy of obtaining maximum benefit from slim pickings, reflect a duality in conceptions of happiness that human beings seem to learn in the cradle. Theodor Fontane put it like this: in order to be happy, I need to have a couple of friends and no toothache. Happiness 1 is the sausage factory and no toothache; Happiness 2 is the slice of sausage and the friends. The first relates to circumstances, the second to our inner lives. We gravitate incessantly towards one or other of these conceptions of happiness. In Latin, version 1 – the objective circumstances – is referred to as for-tuna. Version 2, which concerns our inner life, is called felicitas. We can make unambiguous and authoritative statements about the first, but not the second. The opera house as infrastructure falls within the sphere of Happiness 1. The materials from which it is made, its statics, acoustics and maintenance costs are subjects upon which craftspeople, technicians and financial experts can all agree. Questions such

as whether an opera by Hans Werner Henze can actually be classified as music, or whether it is a good idea to have The Marriage of Figaro performed by seminaked singers soaked in blood, by contrast, are the subject of endless debate. Happiness 2 is the main thing (for without it we could have dispensed with the opera house altogether), but there is no way to establish what constitutes value for money.

Happiness 2 – a public affairThis difficulty is not limited to the

cultural sphere: it is a generalized problem. Modernity has catapulted us into a situation in which it is becoming increasingly important – indeed unavoidable – that we reflect on Happiness 2 and agree on what it means. We thus find ourselves in a schizophrenic state: Happiness 2 is a private affair, but it is also often a collective project. Happiness 2 is becoming a matter of public concern, however insusceptible to discourse it may be; and as modernity advances, so the situation becomes more acute. The need for discourse on Happiness 2 runs the whole gamut of human experience: from massproduced goods such as cars, through TV formats, educational content, research topics, genetic engineering, gender roles, urban planning, landscape architecture, religious conflicts and political orders to social insurance law. For example, should the costs of psychotherapy (an activity concerned solely with Happiness 2) be reimbursed? What about dentures, cosmetic surgery and liposuction? Are the massive disruptions to Happiness 2

caused by subjectively experienced physical deficits not just as bad as an ulcer? Perhaps – but how are we to agree on what constitutes a physical deficit? The question asked by the critical taxpayer – whether a Henze opera can be regarded as music – may have a different focus, but it creates the same uncertainty.

Already we can hear the outraged protestations: “What about the suffering

Anyone can appreciate the usefulness of a motorway

bridge. The use of a woollen thread suspended across a

room in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and

described in the catalogue as an “Installation” is

something not everyone can see…

Art and football both have their passionate

adherents. The issue of justification, then,

is by no means restricted to art.



18

“Champagne Dog”, 2008



19

millions? Send all these art lovers to Kolkata so they can find out what really matters! As long as there is hunger, Aids and oppression, we shouldn’t be wasting money on hedonistic ego trips.” To this one may counter that a substantial part of the global economy is now based on human beings’ quest for Happiness 2, and without this impulse there would be no hope at all for those in need. Further, moralizing objections make not a jot of difference to the fact that people feel challenged by Happiness 2 as soon as the options available to them allow it. For many, the search for Happiness 2 is synonymous with the search for the meaning of life.

This may take an infinite variety of forms: polishing the car, buying your twentieth pair of shoes, flirting with someone via SMS, raving about your iPod or making a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. All of these are governed by the same two ideas, one of which I describe as experien-tial rationality, and the other as self-tran-scendence. In a sense, these two ideas are facing in opposite directions. Experiential rationality is directed inwards. It addresses Happiness 2 directly, aims at felicitas, emotion, fascination, joy, melancholy, excitement, relaxation. It is instrumental action directed towards the inner life. It involves achieving subjective goals by situative means: consumer goods, holiday destinations, TV programmes, sporting events, concerts and the like. The attitude of selftranscendence, by contrast, is directed outwards, at something beyond the subject. The supreme goal is not defined in the inner life; rather, it has the character of an encounter, of being touched, of establishing contact with something else. The means to achieve this selftranscendence are mobilized within our inner lives; they include concentration, education, selfobservation and indepth discussions. In the cultural history of Europe since the Second World War, the motive of experiential rationality initially played the primary role, but now selftranscendence is increasingly coming to the fore. The remarks that follow focus on this more recent motive.

Music as an experience of self-transcendence

The idea of selftranscendence has assumed one of its most distinctive forms in the reception of art since the start of the

bourgeois era in Europe. By way of example, let us look at the history of listening to music. In the late 17th century, there are accounts of guest houses in Amsterdam, known as music lodgings, in which guests were obliged to perform a piece of music. At the same time there arose in Germany circles of citizens and students who played music in public. Johann Sebastian Bach performed in coffee houses with a musical “collegium” that had been founded by Georg Philipp Telemann in 1702 in Leipzig. A decade later, innkeepers in London were organizing weekly concerts. A new way of

listening to music in Europe thus grew up in no less unlikely a place than the local pub. In fact this is no surprise: the public house was a place for everyone, the nursery of the awakening bourgeois consciousness. If culture critics had been around at the time, they would undoubtedly have been forecasting the imminent demise of music, its collapse into the abyss of popular taste. In fact, what happened was the exact opposite. People learned to sit still rather than stamp their feet, to be quiet rather than chatter, to concentrate rather than letting their minds wander. The habit of attentive listening to music is a cultural achievement of the bourgeois audience of the era that has remained with us to this day. Everyone talks about the masses being dumbed down; yet what we have here is an example of them smartening up. Originally, music was viewed more as a pleasant diversion. It had to serve purposes other than the experience itself. In church, it was used to accompany the liturgy and reinforce the religious message. At the courts of kings and princes, music served primarily as a status symbol, as acoustic decoration, and as a medium through which courtiers swam like fish in water. At popular festivals, music was a way of getting people into the right mood. These and other similar forms of functionali zation of music have not entirely disappeared. But they were joined by something new and lasting: the idea of regarding music as an absolute. From now on, music would

not need an occasion. It would be sufficient in its own right.

In search of auraSo contrary to what Walter Benjamin

predicted in his celebrated essay on art in the age of technical reproducibility, the situation today in which music is available wherever and whenever we want it has certainly not destroyed the ability to concentrate on listening; rather it has strengthened and democratized it. If we compare a performance by a band such as Tokio Hotel with a concert by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, we are initially struck by the differences. Yet these can easily obscure what in fact is a fundamental affinity: in both cases, what is at stake is not having, but being; not heightening, but arriving; not fortuna, but felicitas. In both cases it is the idea of selftranscendence that dominates, the quest for aura, the longing for an encounter with phenomena that lie beyond one’s own inner life. Something whose arrival was signalled almost three hundred years ago in the bourgeois reception of music is more alive now than ever, and has long since moved beyond the context of art.

The situation in music is mirrored in the visual arts, with more and more people visiting museums and attending exhibitions. Why don’t they just look at the pictures in the Internet? Because they seek an encounter with something unique in the echo chamber of public acclaim. From our perspective, in a hightech era

where it is extremely easy to reproduce works of art, we can see that Benjamin’s forecast was too pessimistic. It is true that in our everyday lives we are bombarded with an endless stream of images and music far too copious for us to engage with. Yet this fact makes people even more eager to engage with something. In a world of total availability, oneoffs and unrepeatable opportunities are prized as public events more than ever before, even outside the confines of high culture. In their

Never before have so many been so intensely concerned with the topic of happiness

as they are today.

Despotic, religious, nationalistic, racist or

collectivist rationales have been replaced by the

happiness of the many.



20

quest for aura, people stream into football stadiums rather than watching the match on TV.

A tax audit of art That all sounds well and good, but is

it also good material for the tax audit? What does our judge – the discontented and culturophobic taxpayer – have to say? We could try to persuade him or her that

the value of art cannot be reduced either to the work or to the person viewing it. As we have described, the value comes about through the encounter, the moment at which someone engages with the art. There are three dominant patterns, which can best be described by three verbs: ex-plore, inhabit, join in. All three activities denote forms of selftranscendence. Ex-ploring can be likened to doing a jigsaw puzzle. You begin by sitting down in front of all the pieces and not knowing where to start, but you know there is a solution, or at least you trust that there is. Some works of art are more accessible, some less so, some not at all. In music, exploring has a lot to do with the gradual identification of patterns; but painting and sculpture too have established codes which the viewer has to crack. Inhabiting is like taking a walk through a city or a landscape that you have known for a long time. Classical music is such a landscape. It is a strictly protected environment: not a single note may be changed. Art history too is such a landscape. Kafka, Proust, Chekhov, Brecht, Musil, Thomas Mann and others have bequeathed to us oeuvres that are like landscapes offering enough different facets to last a lifetime. Finally, joining in is a backandforth process involving various actors. At the opera or the theatre, the audience watch a piece whose course is dictated by a script. Yet they are not merely spectators, but also active participants. An opera performance is a ritual that involves everyone.

Even such things as deciding what to wear and getting dressed up are part of the script; the punctual start, the quiet concentration during the performance, the applause between scenes and at the end – all these remain unchanged and, in so doing, take on elements of liturgy. The same applies to festivals, exhibitions and readings. Joining in involves the audience in the here and now, while the rituals create a framework for the encounter with art.

Exploring, inhabiting and joining in are ways in which selftranscendence is expressed. They presuppose the existence of something external, something beyond the inner life with which one can make contact, whether or not the context of the experience is described as “art.” Comparative cultural studies have revealed that people throughout the world view this as an enjoyable experience – quite unlike paying their taxes. Some of that tax money is thrown out of the window, some of it is invested in useful things, some is sacrificed in the pursuit of fleeting happiness. The first drives taxpayers crazy, the second they accept with a sigh, but the third makes them smile.

Gerhard Schulze teaches methods of empirical social research at the University of Bamberg. His particular interests include time diagnosis and future developments. He has contributed his ideas to numerous collaborations with business, politicians, the media and the cultural scene. His most recent publication is entitled Krisen. www.gerhardschulze.deThis article is a shortened and adapted form of a speech given by Professor Gerhard Schulze at the “Art Will Make You Happy!” conference held by the Culture and Economy Forum. You can find the full version of the speech (in French and German) at www.kulturundoekonomie.ch Translated from the German by Geoffrey Spearing

In a world of total avail-ability, one-offs and

unrepeatable opportunities are prized as public events

more than ever before, even outside the confines of

high culture.



21

“Fire”, 2008



22

“Impossible Balance Act”, 2008



23

“Collage Family”, 2007



24

n every age thinkers have tried to define happiness and to define art; but to ask if art brings happiness is an astonishing question. It makes you feel like keeping your head down

and sloping off. I have only one way of moving beyond this astonishment (and this is certainly not arrogance, rather the contrary): by talking about my practice of writing, that is to say what I feel and experience at the moment when a text comes into being, hatches out.

*I want to state from the outset that

these moments of writing resemble a kind of joy, even though nothing is ever easy, even though there may be despondency, fury, tiredness, the wish to chuck the whole thing in and run for cover. But these tribulations count for little compared with the sensuous need to grasp words, to glorify them, without even worrying about what, sooner or later, will appear as a result of this wild handtohand combat, this exhilarating dance.

*First of all there is the need to

withdraw into oneself, to turn one’s back for the time being on the world, to welcome silence and solitude. Although this act is a selfish one, dispensing with others, it is good to leave human miseries behind, greed, imbeciles, thickskinned people, to leave behind desires, backbiting, the pettiness of everyday life, and even those who matter, those whom we love.

To give oneself up entirely to literature, before which – and what does it matter if this sounds highflown – the writer assumes his responsibility.

*Then the work can begin, in a safe

place. I have in mind some sensations, some ideas, some words arriving all jumbled, constructions suddenly turning up, colours taking shape, tonalities that will not only enable me to translate the ideas or sensations I start out with, but to generate a form, something unexpected and going far beyond my initial intentions. And this event that comes into being by the act of writing, that arises at the end of a sen

tence or a paragraph, this path which creates itself line by line, has no equal, it excites and stimulates, it is worth devoting oneself to. In this game the wild goose chases, wrong turnings, blind alleys and defeats are all part of the adventure, just as much as the successes.

*Here I am – delighted, captivated,

swept away, captured.By words.By language.Language has been around for a long

time and will be around for a long time to come. I am keen to take care of it, perhaps

because it returns the compliment, that is to say it cares for me as well, in its fashion. When I occupy the territory of writing that is coming into being and when I am in fact also circumscribed by it, I feel good. Language and I are friends, accomplices, lovers too. I sense that language is my opportunity. The erotic, carnal element is important, even if caring does not exclude a certain violence, battles, distortions or even simple twists and flicks; at any rate there is nothing tragic about all this because it all takes place in a loving relationship. This relationship, this encounter are privileged moments. No one has any hold on them and no one will be able to wrest them from me, no one will put the mockers on my magic or trample on my wonderments. This confers a strength, a force that

laughs at power, an invulnerability that could not care less about cockades and laurels. What more precious privilege – one that always has to be reconquered – could be dreamt of? Finally, if writing means isolating oneself, this isolation is a means of acting, a way of not being satisfied, of rejecting shallowness, of smashing through flabbiness, insignificance. This isolation is a way of better perceiving that which dumbly signals to us and wishes to be said. Thanks to words, the despair of others, my own pain, but also the joys that literature finds so hard to express can be transformed, can attain a different status.

And even if this should turn out to be only an illusion, what does it matter, because the enjoyment of this illusion is very real and will communicate itself – I continue to hope – to the readers, and offer them living material that will enrapture them.

*What is also real and what is

perhaps the most important point is that writing, this dynamic brawl, while strengthening me also prevents me from knowing who I am, prevents me from taking possession of myself. I am a moving subject, a vagabond advancing on words, by words, the exact opposite of fixity, of the totalitarian subject ready to commit any crime in order to defend what he believes himself to be. So yes, it is happiness to be able, text after text, to hurl oneself

into the reality of writing, under the spell which impels me to seek a music as well as to ask, again and again: who are all these “egos” inside me?

Michel Layaz first came to the attention of a wider readership with the publication of Les Larmes de ma mère (My Mother’s Tears, Zoé, 2003, and Points/Seuil, 2006) and La Joyeuse Complainte de l’idiot (The Idiot’s Joyful Complaint, Zoé 2004 and Points/Seuil 2010). His most recent work, Cher Boniface (Dear Boniface) was published by Zoé in 2009. www.layaz.com Translated from the French by Paul Knight

In the Thrall of Writing

Language is his friend, his accomplice and his beloved, and it is his

privilege to succumb to its thrall: writer Michel Layaz reports

on the moments of happiness, as well as of rage and despondency,

writing affords him.

By Michel Layaz

I



25

“Can Someone Tell Us Why We Are Here??”, 2006



26

he most striking feature of debates about the pub-lic value of the arts and cultural policy in the in-dustrialized world today is the growing difficulty of

advocating state funding of the arts with-out alienating politicians, arts administra-tors, artists or tax payers. There is very lit-tle mystery about the art world’s increasing struggle to “make a case” for funding; indeed, the reasons for the impasse are well doc-umented. I believe the strug-gle is first and foremost a symptom of the crisis of the welfare state, which crisis is in turn a function of the “re-treat of the state” under the pressure of globalization, the burden of an aging popula-tion and the concomitant strain on health and social services, and the trend to limiting the state’s expendi-ture even as the public call for better services and lower taxes. Add to this the obliga-tion to justify the art world’s claims on the public purse while explaining why certain forms of artistic expression deserve institutional support and public funding while others are left to fend for themselves on the free mar-ket, and you will understand why “making a case” for arts funding requires considera-ble rhetorical creativity. In the past, when a “liberal hu-manist” view of culture still generated a widely accepted canon of values, it was easy to identify the artistic en-deavours deserving of state promotion and financial support. Develop-ments in cultural theory over the past forty years, however, have challenged traditional cultural authority and the hierarchies that subtend it, such as the dichotomy between “high art” and “popular” or “commercial art”, and which cause deep cracks in the once solid foundations of (canonical) cul-ture. The post-modern attack on tradi-tional cultural values and their repre-sentative institutions has complicated the

formulation of cultural policy, proceeding as it invariably does (especially in times of budget cuts) from value judgements as it allocates funding and decides which artis-tic practices to support.

“Policy attachment”: culture in the name of social inclusion

The cultural sector has responded to an increasingly trying environment with a

strategy of “policy attachment” (as coined by British academic Clive Gray) whereby the arts, which constitute a policy area commanding small budgets and little po-litical clout, have progressively “attached” themselves to economic and social agen-das, and thus benefit from the larger budg-ets and greater political influence of these areas of public policy. It is as a result of this process of attachment that we have wit-nessed the growing popularity of two prin-

cipal instrumentalist propositions regard-ing the role of the arts in contemporary society: that the arts enjoy positive trans-formative powers that can be used as a tool for social inclusion and cohesion; and that, given their positive impact on em-ployment, leisure spending and urban re-generation potential, among other things, the arts may be deployed as an engine for both local and national economic devel-

opment.In many respects, “at-

tachment” has proved a suc-cessful strategy, at least in Britain. It seems beyond question that the arts in the UK have never been more central to the political de-bate (if not always in a posi-tive light) than they have become over the past two decades, and that their tar-geting social and economic goals (such as urban regen-eration, health promotion, education and crime fight-ing) has granted the arts access to non-arts budgets. The drawbacks of this strat-egy, however, have been re-vealed by the growing trend in the industrialized west to “evidence-based policy-making”, and by the official adoption of the creed that “what works is what counts” as a guideline for policy making and public-spend-ing decisions.

The need to provide funders with “evidence” of the cultural sector’s so cio-economic influence has meant that arts organiza-tions in receipt of public funding are expected to col-

lect data on the background and consump-tion habits of their audience, and to deter-mine the extent to which targets set by the funders have been met. Such evidence is in turn expected to support the proposition that the arts can perform a diverse range of functions, including the promotion of urban regeneration, fostering social inte-gration, improving health, even reducing crime. It is no wonder, therefore, that among the by-products of the policy devel-

On the Purpose of Art, or,

Why We Need a New Discussion

of Values In the name of fundraising and consolidation

of power, cultural policy in the United Kingdom is increasingly making its way onto

the socio-economic agenda. We all know the argument: culture fosters integration while

rendering the geographic location of its producers attractive to potential investors. And

yet this very strategy, which had at first proved so successful, is currently stalled, making

a discussion of values indispensable.

By Eleonora Belfiore

T



27

opments outlined above is the burgeoning field of “impact studies”, which purports to measure the social and/or economic impact of subsidized art. The increasing centrality of this socialscience approach has reduced public debates about arts funding to an oversimplified discussion of the so

cioeconomic impact of the arts at the expense of a genuine discussion of their value and function in contemporary society.

As a result, it would appear that more energy has gone into the search for the perfect impact assessment methodology than in trying to understand what the phrase “arts impact” actually means, and in trying to explore the ideas and values that are implicit in the assumption of the “transformative powers” of the arts as a rationale for policy making and funding.

A double-edged swordThe shortcomings of the impacteval

uation methods currently in use (to determine either social or economic impact) also have key political consequences. In Britain today there is a broad consensus among policy analysts, policymakers and representatives of New Labour (which while in power had been responsible for the promotion of an instrumentalist cultural agenda) that an evidencebased assessment of the socioeconomic impact of the arts is inadequate. For it need hardly be said that, if spending on the arts is justified by their presumed socioeconomic impact, and if evidence of this impact is scarce, the entire “arts for social inclusion” project is at risk. And thus the instrumentalist argument for subsidizing culture, which in Britain has been very successful indeed in directing financial resources to the arts, may eventually prove to be a doubleedged sword.

Paradoxically, however, the lack of robust evidence on the socioeconomic impact of the arts has not weakened the instrumentalist discourse – quite the opposite, in fact. Of course, if the instrumentalist argument was to survive the “evi

dence problem”, a selective approach to collecting and presenting statistical data originating from impactevaluation studies was required, paired with a calculated overestimation of the arts’ potential to bring about the type of change favoured by the government and artsfunding bodies. Such a cavalier attitude to the truth value of claims in support of the arts abounds in the UK. In 2003 Chris Smith, who had been the first Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in Tony Blair’s New Labour government and was respected by the British cultural sector as a whole for having secured a vast increase in funding for the sector, made a telling confession: “I acknowledge unashamedly that when I was Secretary of State, going into what always seemed like a battle with the Treasury, I would try and touch the buttons that would work” – that is, issue brazenly exaggerated statements on the socioeconomic benefits of culture.

Another indicator of a certain lack of honesty on the part of officials involved in public debates concerning cultural policy is their typical focus on the putative transformative power of the arts, bolstered by a meliorative teleology that posits the inevitability of improvement (moral, behavioural, educational, psychological and so on) despite the likelihood of the arts’ having both positive and negative effects on its consumers.

The politics of cultural outreachWhat conclusions, then, can be drawn

from the picture painted so far? Is it possible to move beyond instrumentality, or are we condemned to always looking beyond the arts to seek credible arguments for their importance to contemporary society outside their immediate purview? I think it would advance the debate if we were to discuss evidencebased policymaking with greater honesty: for it is frankly absurd to believe that decisions about the arts can be moved out of the political arena and into an ideologicallyfree sphere, and that this or that particular art form can be judged for its utility to policymakers purely on the basis of the evidence available. New Labour’s pragmatist approach (“what works is what counts”) is at best naive, and at worst misleading. Reliance on evidence of impact and instrumentalist justifications for state involve

ment in support for the arts will never rid policymaking of ideology.

The proposition that policymaking – including the cultural variety – constitutes a profoundly political exercise is borne out by the simple fact that, despite the universally agreed scarcity and inadequacy of the available evidence on their socioeconomic impact, the arts continue to be funded. Indeed, if the allocation of funding were truly based on evidence of effectiveness in achieving policy goals, the arts would be in real trouble. As it is, decisions on funding for the arts are political, and are made without regard to evidence (whatever that may be). The earmarking of public (and private) resources for the arts and culture is in fact a matter of values, of the kind of society we want to live in – a political question if ever there was one. And although values (and beliefs) are generally absent from public debates about cultural funding and policy, eschewed as potentially controversial, they are in fact the raison d’être of support for the arts.

If we are serious about moving away from an overreliance on instrumentalist justifications of the place of the arts in society, we need to recognize the centrality of values and beliefs about the arts to the culturalpolicy process, how the arts affect individuals and society, and what makes them worthy of financial support. That such values and beliefs are not (at the moment) supported by the sort of evidence policymakers desire need not undermine their influence on the public sphere. Sim

ilarly, if we want to develop an alternative, less instrumentalist articulation of cultural value, we need to accept that the process will have an ideological dimension, and that as a result it might not always be possible to reach a consensus.

“Instrumentalism” is 2500 years oldIf it is any consolation, the chronicle

of “western” civilization has never recorded a consensus on the “goodness” (or

New Labour’s pragmatist approach (“what

works is what counts”) is at best naive, and at worst

misleading.

If the allocation of funding were truly based on

evidence of effectiveness in achieving policy goals,

the arts would be in real trouble.



28

“badness”) of the arts. In fact, the history of “western” aesthetics bristles with claims for the moral agency of the arts that are far more complex than contemporary policy debates would have you believe. Furthermore, discussion of the function of the arts has always been highly politicized: the first coherent instrumentalist cultural policy was elaborated by Plato some 2500 years ago in his Republic, a study of the ideal of the just state Thus “instrumentalism” is as old as “western” civilization itself, while the obsession with measurement and “evidence of impact” is thoroughly modern. Let me bracket the question of evidence for a moment to suggest that we take inspiration from 2500 years of philosophical enquiries into the arts and their effects on human beings as a starting point, in our quest to move beyond narrowly instrumentalist justifications to a more rounded and intellectually sophisticated articulation of what makes the arts valuable.

Among the most interesting findings of the historical approach, however, is the school of thought about the arts that highlights what we might call their “powers of negative transformation” – that is, their alleged ability to corrupt, to distract from the true path, and to cause unhappiness. In other words, if we contend that the arts can bring about significant change in individuals and societies alike, we must also accept the possibility that such change might be for the worse. The arts can make

us happy, but they can also perturb us. If theories of social contagion are to be believed, certain forms of art and popular culture can even inspire their consumers to dangerous mimesis. A genuine discussion of the value of the arts must therefore be prepared to face the potential controversy arising from the study of what the arts “do” to people. And while this ap

proach to a validation of the arts is much more difficult than relying on relatively straightforward instrumentalist notions of socioeconomic impact, it may well prove more useful in the long term.

Further reading: Belfiore, E. (2009) “On bullshit in cultural policy practice and research: notes from the British case”, International Journal of Cultural Policy, Vol. 15, n. 3, pp. 343–359. Belfiore, E. and Bennett, O. (2008) The Social Impact of the Arts: An Intellectual History. Palgrave/MacMillan, Basingstoke. Gray, C. (2002) “Local government and the arts”, Local Government Studies, Vol. 28, n.1, pp. 77–90. Dr Eleonora Belfiore is Associate Professor in Cultural Policy at the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies based at the University of Warwick, UK. Her recent research has focused on the theoretical and methodological problems posed by the socioeconomic impact of the arts, and their significance in the rhetoric of official cultural policy. This article is a shortened and adapted form of a speech given by the author at the “Art Will Make You Happy!” conference held by the Culture and Economy Forum.

The earmarking of public (and private) resources

for the arts and culture is in fact a matter of values,

of the kind of society we want to live in – a

political question if ever there was one.



29

“Mr. Lucky and Mr. Unlucky”, 2006



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“Mammoth”, 2008



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“The Angry Face”, 2007



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n Greek mythology, Kairos is the god of the right moment, of the favourable opportunity. An epigram by the poet Poseidippos from the 3rd century BC describes his response to a statue

by the sculptor Lysippos.

Who are you?I am Kairos, who conquers every-thing.

Why are you tip-toeing?I am always on the move.

Why do you have wings on your feet?I am as sudden as the wind.

Why the blade in your right hand?To show human beingsThat I cut sharper than all others.

Why the forelock on your fore-head?So that those who meet me can grab it.

Why in god’s name is the back of your head bald?Once I’ve flown past, no one can catch me from behind, however hard he tries.

Why did the artist create you?For your sake, wanderer, to make you think.

The notion of Kairos still survives in colloquial parlance, for instance in the expression that a favourable opportunity has to be “grasped by the forelock” before it escapes. The most famous allusion to Kairos in the recent past was made when Michail Gorbachev visited Erich Honecker in East Berlin in October 1989. At that time Gorbachev allegedly said: “Those who come late are punished by life.” A few weeks later the Berlin Wall fell and Honecker’s regime collapsed.

Kairos can also be translated as “timing”, which is closely linked to the notion of good luck. Correct timing can sometimes give good luck a leg up, and we all

know that nothing makes us more miserable than missed opportunities. This applies not only to everyday life but also to the history of art and arts policy.

The history of art – a sequence of right moments

The history of art as such is basically a string of right moments. What would the history of architecture have been if English entrepreneur and engineer Joseph Paxton had not seized the opportunity to build the Crystal Palace for the first World Exposition in London in 1851 in the space of four months? And imagine what the connection between art and everyday experience would be today if in 1969 Andy Warhol had

not recognized the signs of the times and abandoned his career as a graphic designer to become an artist. The “Swiss Wonder”, the international triumph of a new generation of artists from Switzerland in the 1990s, was not a compensation decreed on high to make up for a long phase of artistic stagnation. On the contrary, phenomena such as the breakthrough of Pipilotti Rist are the result of many individual factors, a whole series of chances which all have one thing in common: the grasping of opportunity. I suppose that all the actors involved in this good luck realized at an early

stage that the cultural sphere was expanding, that the artist took advantage of the possibilities of technology and the interest of the public, that mediators recognized the potential, that critics were carried away and that art dealers exploited the right contacts at the right moment. However this would not have been possible without countless other decisions that were taken far earlier. These include the increased support for the training of young artists from the 1980s onwards, the network of grants and exchange workshops, the backing for a finemesh, decentralized network of small galleries, exhibition centres and festivals by the state and private industry and the determination to make their

presence felt abroad. Working on the premise that

successful art policy, successful art and happy people are inextricably linked, I would now like to present an artist whose oeuvre constantly revolved around the role of timing, who investigated the meaning of happiness in art and in life in his performance art, and whose work influenced my own ideas about the connections between luck and happiness. I am referring to the American artist Allan Kaprow, who was born in 1927 and died in 2006. When my colleague Hedy Graber and I invited Kaprow to a workshop in the Palazzo Art Gallery in Liestal in summer 1996, he conducted a series of activities with us under the title Performing Life. One of the activities consisted of someone drawing a line on the road with chalk and another person following and erasing it with a rubber. The activity lasted until either the chalk

or the rubber was worn out. As I knelt on the square in front of the railway station and drew my line, while my partner keenly rubbed it out, a woman waiting there watched us. Finally she asked us what we were doing. I replied that I was drawing a line which my partner was rubbing out until either the chalk or the rubber was used up. “Hey, that’s just like life,” she exclaimed.

No spectators, just playersThis bringing together of art and life

is a constant theme running through the

Timing and Happiness

The idea of the “favourable opportu-nity” is closely linked to the notion of

happiness. Allan Kaprow was an artist who staged the meaning of

happiness in art and life as a theatre play. Art historian Philip Ursprung explains why Kaprow’s

happenings are a source of contentment for him and what kind of cultural

policy makes him happy.

By Philip Ursprung

I



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American artist’s art. Like many others of his generation in the 1950s, Kaprow was looking for ways of escaping from the dominance of abstract expressionist painting. For him the embodiment of the artistic dilemma of the 1950s was Jackson Pollock, who had radically expanded the limits of painting but who ultimately remained remote and could not immerse himself in the

image. In Kaprow’s view, Pollock was typical of the tragic and therefore of the unhappy artistic hero. By contrast Kaprow was interested in happy art, which he sought in the playful and the experimental – for example when he stressed that experimental art could never be tragic and that it was a prelude. Kaprow solved the problem of limitation to the painting by means of environments, atmospheric settings in which beholders could literally immerse themselves. He exposed them to an ambience of impressions embracing all the senses, where, as in the case of “Yard”, they could touch and change objects. At the beginning of the 1960s he developed this method further in happenings. The images came as it were to life, they were performed, as in “A Spring Happening”, where an actor scattered the startled spectators with a lawn mower. In a third phase he completely cancelled the separation between actors and spectators reminiscent of the structure of the theatre. After a while there were no more spectators in his happenings, only actors, the action and the location. Actors and spectators merged inextricably into each other, creating an event that took place entirely in the present.

The battle of the sexes as a happeningIn his happening “Household” – the

Greek word for which is economia – in May 1964, Cornell University students fought a kind of battle of the sexes on a rubbish tip for a day. After Kaprow’s introduction in a lecture room, the participants drove to the scene of the battle. There were no spectators. The action was a ritualized battle of the sexes fought between a group of women

and a group of men, with a third group operating as a chorus in the background. The morning was spent building. The men constructed a “tower” from bars, boards, ropes, car tyres and other bits of rubbish. The women built a “nest” around which they placed a washing line on which they hung old clothes. In the afternoon, cars arrived with their booty, a smoking car wreck, in tow. The men pushed the wreck into a hole and smeared it with marmalade. The women remained in their nest, screaming. The chorus surrounded the scene, hiding behind trees. Then the men went to the nest and stole the clothes hanging on the line. The women went over to the car and licked off the marmalade. During this time the men destroyed the nest, then returned to the car, drove away the women and started eating marmalade themselves, which they spread on slices of bread. The women ran away cursing and demolished the men’s tower. The battle of the sexes ran its course. The men then returned to the car and, egged on by the women, smashed it up with sledgehammers. After they had set fire to the car, the women left the scene in the cars they came in, tooting loudly. The men clustered round the smoking wreck, lit up cigarettes and waited till the car was burnt out.

Starting off with activities such as building and furnishing, playing and dancing, “Household” culminated in the symbolic eating of a car wreck. The happening evoked topics such as sexual liberation, the growing interest in life in the country, and criticism of the throwaway society. During the happening, the participants had the opportunity to enact the joys and the miseries of living together, of eating and, above all, of contact with the opposite sex. The success of the happening depended on their participation. The form of the performance was the result of a process that defied planning and was based on collective, pragmatic decisions.

Art as child’s play Kaprow said that the transitory na

ture of “Household” was one of the qualities that distinguished his happenings from previous art forms. In his view this was a result of the increasingly short life expectancy of works of art. By focusing on the life expectancy of an art work, Kaprow showed that he was no longer interested in

the nature of art but in the question of its location and its function. He was not concerned with the key question for modern art (“What is art?), the question as to its essence or nature, but asked rather “Where is art?”, “How long does art last?”, “Who does art address?”: in other words, the question of its function and its place. He was always acutely aware of the role of timing, stressing that artists should not hope for fame in posterity but must make their voice heard in the present. “[The artist] must putup or shutup, succeed in conveying his vision in reasonably good time or consider giving up the attempt.” He had his roots in American pragmatism, not in European idealism. In answer to Joseph Beuys’s claim that “Every person is an artist”, Kaprow might have replied: “Every artist is a person.” When he spoke of the fusion of art and life, he was not espousing the goal of avantgarde artists who seek to improve life through art and try to solve the problems of reality. His concern was rather to improve art by exposing it to the complexity and contradictoriness of life.

His happenings were not performances of something but the “happening” of a specific, unique collective experience. In structural terms they are reminiscent of children’s games, the temporary submission to selfimposed rules – in contrast to adults’ games, which are generally competitive. I would argue that this temporary cancellation of distance and the absence of any purpose leads to happy moments. Playing according to selfimposed rules by which no one can lose and no one can make a mistake relieves the pressure of having to reach a certain goal, enabling all participants to act in the here and now.

We need freedom to manoeuvreWhen Hedy Graber and I invited Allan

Kaprow to Liestal in 1966, his reputation was at a low point. One of his students had drawn our attention to him. At that time even experts did not know whether he was still alive. So it could be argued that our

In answer to Joseph Beuys’s claim that “Every person

is an artist”, Kaprow might have replied: “Every

artist is a person.”

We were given support and left to get on with

things. I am convinced that this is the basis of

successful culture policy.



34

curatorial timing in terms of the immediate impact was poor. The exhibition attracted about two dozen visitors and we sold maybe ten copies of the catalogue. But the activities left a lasting impression. One of them was to shake hands with someone and to ask “Is it warm yet?” until someone answered “Yes”. These activities changed my way of perceiving everyday gestures and altered my sense of the passage of time. At the end of the workshop I had the impression that I had achieved a great deal and that I had learnt to see better. At the moment of the activity and in retrospect, I had a feeling of happiness.

This feeling makes me wonder if the timing really was so bad. True, there were no press reports and the art market did not react at all. But the constellation set a number of things in motion. At last I had the material for my book on happenings, a subject that still fascinates me and that has been taken up by many students. And when I consult the list of participants in our catalogue, I find many among them who have since gone on to enjoy international careers as artists, actors, architects and curators. All those I have met since cherish happy memories of the event.

To be happy, we need freedom to manoeuvre. That is the role of the promotion of culture. In the 1990s, Hedy Graber and I had the privilege of being able to exhibit whatever we wanted. The cultural promotion schemes of the canton and central government subsidized our work without interfering in any way. We were given the

freedom to ask our own questions, regardless of agreements on objectives, of guidelines and visitor numbers. We were given support and left to get on with things. I am convinced that this is the basis of successful culture policy. Culture cannot exist without financial backing. We need only look at art scenes that once flourished, that have had to survive without finance and have faded in the space of a few years, for example in Moscow and in Santiago de Chile, but also in Italy today (except for the

Biennale) to realize how exposed contemporary art is, how dependent it is on funding and how vital access to the market is. Without the protection of states and institutions, art scenes risk vanishing rapidly. Culture is a fragile and ephemeral phenomenon, like Kairos itself. It must have its locations and its platforms. Above all it is essential that we allow room for manoeuvre to those who decide to work as producers of culture. The main thing is to leave them in peace and at the same time to give them space. Then happiness happens automatically.

Philip Ursprung (born 1963 in Baltimore, MD), has been Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Zurich since 2005. His most recent book is entitled Die Kunst der Gegenwart, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2010. This article is a shortened and adapted form of a speech given by the author at the “Art Will Make You Happy!” conference held by the Culture and Economy Forum. Translated from the German by Paul Knight

Culture is a fragile and ephemeral phenomenon,

like Kairos itself. It must have its locations

and its platforms.



35

“Smoke Bombs”, 2008


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: Lor

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Sound Surroundings

Milieux Sonores, an exhibi-tion hosted by swissnex San Francisco, presents imaginary soundscapes by Swiss artists, composers, and sound design-ers. Here, symbolism and cutting-edge technology combine to create a special kind of acoustic experience.

By Peter Kraut, Zurich – “Talking” walls are usually found in cheap rented apartments or crime fiction. With our ears, we can penetrate solid walls, eaves-drop, and try to divine what is happening on the other side. And anyone who has ever strolled down the long corridors of a mu-sic conservatory has heard the singular acoustic poetry generated by random frag-ments of music history overlapping as one passes by.

Milieux Sonores, an exhibition created by the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology (ICST) at the Zurich University of the Arts, presents the artistic and scientific equivalent of such everyday acoustic situations. The original idea was to create “imaginative spaces” that could be shown, says Marcus Maeder, the exhibi-tion’s curator and ICST spokesman. Virtual soundscapes have been the subject of the-ory for some time, but they have rarely been explored in exhibitions. “Build us an imaginary sound space” was thus the chal-lenge issued to the artists – and in Febru-ary 2009, the first results were presented at the Kunstraum Walcheturm gallery space in Zurich. Five quite different positions could be heard – as well as seen and ex-plored – in works staged by artists, com-posers, sound designers and teams of art-ists. Yves Netzhammer and Bernd Schurer,

“Flow Space,” interactive installation by Daniel Bisig/Martin Neukom/ Jan Schacher, 2009

san francisco

new york

paris

rome

warsaw

cairo

cape town

new delhi

shanghai

Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council, maintains offices around the world in order to promote cultural exchange with Switzerland and to expand cultural networks.

local t ime


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A central feature of the exhibition, as well as an important tool in the ICST’s re-search, is a three-meter-high dodecahe-dron, a “test object for housing artistic works,” as Maeder calls it. Standing in its center, visitors are surrounded by numer-ous loudspeakers that can simulate all

kinds of acoustic environments and go far beyond the contemporary cinematic ex-perience of “surround sound”. Here the visitors stay in one place, but the acoustic environment dramatically rotates and moves around them. Another installation in which the symbolic meets the high-tech comes from the duo of Yves Netzhammer and Bernd Schurer. In “Mutmassliche

Windlasten” (“Probable Wind Loads”), Netzhammer plays with objects that are subtly abstract but also rich in associations: a table, drawers, pillars, cushions. Schur-er’s soundtrack adds several more ambiguous facets to this already mysterious installation.

The intersection of art and science

These three examples illus-trate how closely this field links poetry with rationality, precise tech nology with the ineffable. What is ultimately at issue here, says Maeder, is an intersection of art and science, in which neither must serve as a crutch for the other. Rather, it is the interplay be-tween acoustic perception and the other senses that these works care-fully stage and interrogate. Here, the concept of Milieux Sonores is reminiscent of the idea the cul-tural philosopher Aby Warburg applied to his famous library: the intriguing juxtaposition of books and topics rather than a logic of hierarchical classification. Readers interested nevertheless in a more theoretical treatment of these questions are referred to the exhi-

bition’s companion publication, edited by Maeder: Milieux Sonores/Klangliche Mi-lieus. Klang, Raum und Virtualität (“Acous-tic Spaces: Sound, Space and Virtuality” – available in German only).

Milieux Sonores runs at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco from 11 September to 12 November 2010. More information is available at: www.gaffta.org www.swissnexsanfrancisco.org and www.icst.net Peter Kraut, a social scientist, directs the publications programme and works in the music department at the Bern University of the Arts. He teaches and writes about contemporary music, pop culture and fine arts. Translated from the German by Andrew Shields

Felix Profos, Rob van Rijswijk and Jeroen Strijbos, and the trio of Daniel Bisig, Martin Neukom and Jan Schacher all took on a rather demanding task: creating acous-tic environments that could be shown in real space as attractive exhibition architecture.

Mysterious sounds from the room next door

A new version of the exhibi-tion is now on display at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, thanks to swissnex San Fran-cisco, an annex of the State Secretariat for Education and Research dedicated to Swiss-American know ledge transfer in science, education, art and inno-vation. In 2008 swissnex launched a joint project with Pro Helvetia to explore how art, science, and technology interact, so the Mi-lieux Sonores exhibition is a per-fect fit. “The San Francisco Bay Area is ideal for our work,” ex-plains programme director Luc Meier. “The combination of scien-tific know-how, the cutting-edge technology of Silicon Valley com-panies, and the city’s urban, lib-eral culture makes for an ex-tremely fruitful climate.”

For the 2.0 version of the exhibition in San Francisco, the architecture has been redesigned: the dark, somewhat mysteri-ous atmosphere is appropriate to the works’ focus on the realm of the acoustic – that is, the invisible. Along a mine-like space with a crystalline structure, the works are dis-played in separate rooms. Felix Profos, for example, plays consciously with the effect of the “room next door,” reminiscent of the sound artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller: the divergence of acoustic and visual perception is both irritating and intriguing. In other words, when the infor-mation given to us by our eyes and ears does not agree, the imagination immedi-ately goes to work. Profos encourages this by leaving visitors alone in a nearly empty room with a monitor and headphones: they can choose from the mysterious sounds from the rooms next door, and immedi-ately begin to try to solve the riddle of the invisible origin of these sounds.

“Probable Wind Loads,” sound sculpture with environment by Yves Netzhammer and Bernd Schurer, 2009.

When the information given to us by our eyes and

ears does not agree, the imagination immediately

goes to work.


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Rambles through the Eternal City

Political posters, mountains of rubbish and Michelangelo all served as inspiration for Lucerne artist Michelle Grob. Her twelve-month residency at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome was a chance to immerse herself in the “Eternal City.”

By Kordula Doerfler, Rome – It started with a journey. Michelle Grob came to Rome by land, just as grand tourists and artists always did in centuries past. Appro-priately she travelled on a Vespa, stopping off along the way. After a week she was swallowed up by the chaos and tumult of the traffic in the Italian capital. Every day for almost a year, the young Swiss artist navigated her way through the never-end-ing streams of vehicles, looking, searching, collecting. Her travels took her through the millennia, which are overlaid in Rome as almost nowhere else in the world. What Romans take for granted is, for outsiders

and especially for artists, an inexhaustible treasure trove of overwhelming sensual impressions. “Travels through Time” was also the name of the project that Michelle Grob worked on at the Istituto Svizzero, the Swiss cultural institute that annually offers a dozen artists and researchers the chance to live and work in Rome for nearly a year.

An exhibition about an exhibition Michelle Grob’s studio stands in the

garden of the magnificent Villa Maraini, right next to the Via Veneto; it is a bright and uncluttered space in a functional new building with a view of palm trees and cy-presses. When I met her there in May she was hard at work. Outside, next to the en-trance, stood stacks of plastic fruit crates, while inside there were balls of wool in every conceivable colour. “What I find so deeply fascinating about Rome is the con-

tradictions,” says Grob. “Everywhere you see piles of stones from every different era. They are just lying around like rubbish – and right next to them is a modern city with all its modern detritus.” This is Michelle Grob’s inspiration. She collects Rome’s rubbish, the casually discarded products of globalization: umbrellas from China that fall apart at the first gust of wind, plastic objects that no-one needs any more and no-one collects for disposal. Alongside them is a very Italian product: the posters with which Italy’s unloved po-litical caste regale their electorate on an al-most daily basis. Often Grob had no idea

what would emerge at the end of her expe-ditions, but her studio is full of the prod-ucts of her creativity. She photographed people visiting an exhibition of New York artists in Rome, and used the photos to make new posters. Ultimately she plans to produce an exhibition about an exhibition – a distancing technique that is typical of her work.

Crocheted portraits on the Spanish Steps

Grob, from Wil in the canton of St. Gallen, first made her name with vid - eo installations and unconventional cro-cheted creations. Crochet has become her trademark. It all started with a cap. While studying art at university in Lucerne, she had a mental wwto find one anywhere, she decided to crochet it herself. Some Internet research into crocheting techniques fol-lowed, and after the fourth attempt she was satisfied; her new creation became the first of a series, and soon she was offering her products for sale. “It’s an addictive activ-ity,” she laughs. There followed crocheted objects and finally portraits of subjects including Swiss politicians, playing with subtle irony on the perception that crochet is a pastime for demure housewives. Rome left its mark here too. Grob joined the street painters sitting on the Spanish Steps – but began crocheting likenesses rather than painting them. She also drew inspi-ration from Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel and his erotic images, crocheting a series of pornographic pictures in which the colours are duller than the original and therefore more disconcerting in their ef-fect. She continued collecting contrasts until June, when she returned to Switzer-land. However fascinating it might be, she acknowledges with a smile, Rome is not “her” town. As she explains, “I’m more of a country girl myself.”

Exhibition at the Galerie Widmer + Theodoridis contemporary in Zurich from 29 October to 24 December 2010. www.0010.ch Kordula Doerfler has been living in Rome since 2007 and works as a correspondent for the Berliner Zeitung and Frankfurter Rundschau. Translated from the German by Geoffrey Spearing

Self-portrait of the artist as a young woman at the Villa Maraini

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Swiss Lotto, Tribolo, Euro Millions: these games of chance might seem far removed from the world of arts and culture. And yet without them and their umbrella organization Loterie Romande, the cultural sector in French-speaking Switzerland would be missing a crucial source of support.

By Ariane Gigon – The premises are not much to look at. The Loterie Romande (lottery society of the French-speaking Swiss cantons), located in the heart of Lausanne, did not wish to spend money on appearances. But its humble headquarters belie the fact that the Loterie Romande is a key player in nearly all artistic endeavours in French-speaking Switzerland. “Nearly all” because it is impossible to know exactly what proportion of French-Swiss artists benefit from the support of the Loterie Ro-mande. There can be no doubt, however, about the importance of the role the Loterie plays in the artistic sector. In 2009, in the canton of Vaud alone, 324 cultural institu-tions, associations and foundations received a total of 13.5 million Swiss francs in fund-ing. Michel Décosterd, one of the two part-ners of the sound/visual art duo Cod.Act,

puts it like this: “We would never have been able to carry out our projects without the Loterie Romande, which gave us backing for each performance.” Based in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the duo recently received the prestigious Ars Electronica Prize in Linz, in the sound art/digital music category.

After the deduction of profits and run-ning costs for 2009, the Loterie had 192.6 million Swiss francs left over for redistribu-tion. Culture is the main beneficiary, well ahead of other categories like the social sec-tor, national heritage, research and youth activities, and receives an average of 35% to 40% of the total amount, or up to CHF 300,000 a day.

The presidents of the distributing bod-ies of the six French-speaking cantons – Fribourg, Geneva, Jura, Neuchâtel, Valais and Vaud – form a board (known as CPOR) governing the Loterie Romande. CPOR chairman Robert Bielmann explains that “Certain groups need only small amounts. For instance, a group of seniors singing in old age homes were happy to receive a mere 500 Swiss francs! On the other end of the scale, the Loterie Romande supported the construction of the Fribourg Theater to the tune of 2.5 million francs, and has funded entire theatrical seasons.”

Independent distributionJean-Pierre Beuret, the president of the

Loterie Romande, recalls that the institu-tion, which was founded in 1937, “started out to help the victims of the economic cri-sis. Once the economic climate improved, funding was naturally directed toward cul-tural projects.”

Nowadays, the distribution and selec-tion mechanisms run very smoothly. The overall sum available to the cantonal distri-bution bodies is allocated according to two criteria: on a pro rata basis of each canton’s population, and the gross turnover gener-ated by that canton’s lotteries. The distrib-uting bodies have their decisions ratified by the political authorities, but are in fact totally independent of them. This inciden-tally is not the case in German-speaking

Switzerland or the Italian-speaking canton Ticino, where earnings are handed over to the lottery funds run by the cantonal gov-ernments.

In the francophone region of Switzer-land, only associations, foundations or in-stitutions can apply for subsidies. “We do not subsidize individuals,” Robert Bielmann emphasizes, “or projects that have been publicly commissioned. We act as a subsid-iary, filling in any gaps in public funding, or supplementing it.”

It should be no surprise, then, that art-ists rally on behalf of the Loterie Romande whenever it comes under attack – such as when the Federal Gaming Board ruled to ban Tactilo slot machines outside casinos. The case is still pending before the Federal Supreme Court.

With a clear conscience...Nevertheless, doesn’t “inciting” people

to gamble in order to support artists and the common good raise some moral questions? “I say no, absolutely not, without hesita-tion,” asserts Jean-Pierre Beuret. “Every population in the world has always and will always gamble. The best way to manage the sector is to place it under public jurisdiction. Otherwise it falls into the clutches of the criminal underworld. A second principle to be respected: gambling should not enrich individuals, but rather the common good.”

In this vein, the Loterie Romande sup-ports programmes providing information and counseling to prevent gambling addic-tions. It also played an active role in launch-ing a popular initiative that would see the totality of profits made through gaming, including those from casinos, allocated to projects with public purposes. “The initia-tive is sure to pass,” Jean-Pierre Beuret pre-dicts optimistically, “because in French-speaking Switzerland, the Loterie Romande is close to the people.”

www.loterie.ch Ariane Gigon is a freelance journalist and contributes regularly to various media in French-speaking Switzerland, including the newspaper La Liberté and the online news platform swissinfo. Translated from the French by Margie Mounier

A Mainspring of Creativity

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The Tenth Muse Once decried as the recreational drug

of choice for anti-social geeks, computer games today are among the everyday cul-tural pursuits of a broad demographic. And, with manufacturers numbering art-ists of all kinds among their suppliers, it is no surprise that there is talk of cultural subsidies for the genre. In the next issue of Passages we consider the artistic merit of computer games, visit Disney Research Zurich, a computer animation laboratory, and consult a specialist to learn what is new in the games of today, and why hu-man beings play. You will also read about Pro Helvetia’s involvement in the compu-ter game sector and how state patronage works in Germany and France.

As of mid-December then it’s Start Game.

PassagesRecent Issues:

On the Art of Translation No. 52

Intro(se)duction to the Arts No. 51

Strange Bedfellows No. 50

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Publisher: Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council www.prohelvetia.ch Editorial Staff:Managing Editor and Editor, German edition: Janine Messerli Assistance: Isabel Drews and Elisabeth Hasler Editor, French edition: Marielle Larré Editor, English edition: Rafaël Newman Editorial Address:Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council Passages Hirschengraben 22 CH-8024 Zurich T +41 44 267 71 71 F +41 44 267 71 06 [email protected] Graphic Design:Raffinerie, AG für Gestaltung, Zurich Printing:Druckerei Odermatt AG, Dallenwil Print Run:20,000 © Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council. All rights reserved. Reproduction only by permission of the editors. Bylined articles do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher. Photographs © the photographers; reproduction by permission only. Pro Helvetia supports and promotes Swiss culture in Switzerland and throughout the world. It supports diversity in creative culture, stimulates reflection on cultural needs, and contributes to an open and culturally pluralist Switzerland.

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DAS KULTURMAGAZIN VON PRO HELVETIA, NR. 50/2009

Kunst im ToToT wowo nship: FeFeF stival füfüf r Brenda Fassie S.6Im Schatata ten der Pyramiden: Schwhwh eizer Kunst auaua s Kairo S.420.02692308 Gramm: Das E-Book macht Lektüre leicht S. 45

Duett oder Duell? Zum Verhältnis von Kultur und Politik

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DAS KULTURMAGAZIN VON PRO HELVETIA, NR. 51, AUSGABE 3/2009

Neue Aussichten: Kunst geht bergwärts S. 6Warschau: Alltagsgeschichten für die Bühne S. 36

Kunst in der Krise: Optimismus um jeden Preis S. 41

Die Kunst(ver)führer

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DAS KULTURMAGAZIN VON PRO HELVETIA, NR. 52, AUSGABE 1/2010

Alice im Zululand: Berner Musiker auf Afrika-Tournee S. 6 Transatlantische Wahlverwandtschaft: Adolf Dietrich in New York S. 38

Kunst im öffentlichen Raum: Die eierlegende Wollmilchsau S. 41

Die Redewender:Zur Kunst des Übersetzens

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THE CULTURAL MAGAZINE OF PRO HELVETIA, NO. 52, ISSUE 1/2010

Alice in Zululand: Bernese Musicians on Tour in Africa p. 6Trans-Atlantic Affi nity: Adolf Dietrich in New York p. 38Art in the Public Sphere: All-Purpose Masterpieces p. 41

The Power of BabelOn the Art of Translation


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By Guy Krneta – Long before written language and printed books, stories were told and speech was composed in metre. Even in this age of standardized language, the oral tradition continues to hold a cer-tain sway over literature, and the results are accepted as a matter of course in many linguistic regions, foremost among them the English-speaking world. However, in German-speaking Switzerland, home to five million speakers of a range of mutually comprehensible dialects (known signifi-cantly as Mundarten or “oral varieties”) which segue seamlessly across the German and Austrian borders into related regional dialects, such diglossia is treated as a prob-lem. For the allemanophone Swiss make a sharp distinction between their spoken and written tongues, and the use of the de-motic for literary purposes runs the risk of seeming merely faddish.

Every few years, the dialects of Ger-man-speaking Switzerland are “in” again: not long ago, for example, Switzerland’s

dialects were said to be on the cusp of con-quering the country’s major theatres; but after three or four productions in non-standardized German on various city stages the whole thing had blown over. In Swiss rock music, however, the new wave of dialect lyrics that had begun in the early 1990s shows no sign of dissipating. The word Mundartrock in current use is not limited to the language of a given song, but describes a veritable genre of music as well. Reviewing an English-speaking band’s ap-pearance, a writer in a Swiss periodical noted that the musicians in question make “Swiss Mundartrock, as it were, except with English lyrics” – and it was clearly meant as a slur.

Contemporary literature in Swiss dia-lect, for its part, enjoys no more than a nodding acquaintance with earlier exam-ples of folk literature. Personally I accord greater significance to the influence of world literature, which moves writers to confront the fact of the written/spoken

dichotomy surrounding them. Vernacu-lars, which lend themselves well to the warts-and-all portrayal of social reality, have artistic potential that goes well be-yond the merely sociological. In 1964 Kurt Marti, one of the leading proponents of the so-called “modern-mundart” move-ment (whose indebtedness to the some-what older Vienna Group was patent), called impatiently for Mundartliteratur to apply the literary techniques devised by the Expressionists, Dadaists, Surrealists and Concrete Poets. Marti’s call was heeded long ago, although this did not prevent a reviewer of Pedro Lenz’s newly published novel from wondering in all seriousness whether Mundartliteratur had perhaps not yet been given its due…

But although the Swiss school system does not countenance it, dialect is cur-rently enjoying considerable popularity in everyday life and by way of the electronic media. It is particularly worth noting that dialect is the lingua franca not only of our spoken communication but also – espe-cially among the young – of our writing. And even as the education authorities la-ment our waning proficiency in writing, we are in fact experiencing a phase of enor-mous linguistic creativity. New written languages and codes, in which letters are on occasion replaced with other characters or with images, are constantly springing up in response to the new media.

Spoken languages change faster than the standardized variety. They are extreme - ly receptive to foreign words, which they assimilate with ease, and adapt their sound to demographic developments without sac-rificing their independence. They remind us that individual languages are them-selves polyglot. When we consider just how many languages we encounter each day, and how natural it has become in our eve-ryday life to switch among them, we can-not help but wonder why literature has been stymied by the phenomenon. Mundart literatur could well open the door to a world of letters that is itself multilingual.

Guy Krneta is a playwright and spoken-word performer. He is a member of the spoken-word ensemble Bern ist überall (“Bern is every-where”) and co-founder of the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel. Translated from the German by Rafaël Newman

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Of Bards and Bandwagons


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GALLERYA Showcase for Artists“Global Garden”, 2000 Detail from the comic of the same name by Tom TiraboscoPastel and monotype (glass-plate rubbing)

‘Global Garden’ all revolves around a dream of mine in which my scepticism about alleged progress, technology and un-bridled growth provides the manifest content. It’s a pretty me-lancholy and nostalgic story that helps itself generously to venerable figures and characters while at the same time wor-king with the codes and clichés of contemporary comics.” Tom Tirabosco

The comic, part of a special edition of the magazine Strapazin, is intended to introduce Chinese readers to the cream of the contemporary Swiss comics scene. The edition, produced with the support of Pro Helvetia, is available at www.strapazin.ch. In September, hard on the heels of the special edition, an issue will appear in Switzerland with examples of work by the Swiss artists’ Chinese counterparts.

Illustrator and comic-strip artist Tom Tirabosco (born 1966) lives and works in Geneva.


www.prohelvetia.ch/passages/en

“Language and I are friends, accomplices, lovers too. I sense that language is my opportunity.”

“Never before have so many been so intensely concerned with the topic of happiness as they are today.”

“Therein lies the need for an institution like Pro Helve-tia: by enabling artistic participation, it makes possible a myriad of small moments of happiness…”

“In answer to Joseph Beuys’s claim that ‘Every person is an artist’, Kaprow might have replied: ‘Every artist is a person.’” Timing and Happiness

Philip Ursprung, p. 32

The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number, Pius Knüsel, p. 12

In the Thrall of WritingMichel Layaz, p. 24

Sewers or the Sublime? Gerhard Schulze, p. 16

Pro Helvetia supports and promotes Swiss culture in Switzerland and throughout the world.


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passages - Pro Helvetia · This issue of Passages is dedicated to the felicity provided by art. It was conceived in tandem with the Forum Kultur und Ökonomie ... plankton, an important